Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aa
dam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omni audient ears. Aadam Sinai w
as in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew
with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scar
cely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam h
ad more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugat
ed his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferocio
usly, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Sal
eem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a t
ime, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed… altho
ugh when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their colour,
which was blue. Ice blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kash
miri sky… but there is no need to elaborate further.
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our futur
e; he, Emergency born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; b
ut when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger,
harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile ben
eath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees and nose, does not (as far as
I can tell) surrender to dreams. How much was heard by those flapping ears
which seemed, on occasion, to be burning with the heat of their knowledge?
If he could have talked, would he have cautioned me against treason and bul
ldozers? In a country dominated by the twin multitudes of noises and smells
, we could have been the perfect team; but my baby son rejected speech, and
I failed to obey the dictates of my nose.
'Arre baap,' Padma cries, 'Just tell what happened, mister! What is so surpri
sing if a baby does not make conversations?'
And again the rifts inside me: I can't. You must. Yes.
April 1976 found me still living in the colony or ghetto of the magicians; m
y son Aadam was still in the grip of a slow tuberculosis that seemed unrespo
nsive to any form of treatment. I was full of forebodings (and thoughts of f
light); but if any one man was the reason for my remaining in the ghetto, th
at man was Picture Singh.
Padma; Saleem threw in his lot with the magicians of Delhi partly out of a s
ense of fitness a self flagellant belief in the rectitude of his belated des
cent into poverty (I took with me, from my uncle's house, no more than two s
hirts, white, two pairs trousers, also white, onetee shirt, decorated with p
ink guitars, and shoes, one pair, black); ' partly, I came out of loyalty, h
aving been bound by knots of gratitude to my rescuer, Parvati the witch; but
I stayed when, as a literate young man, I might at the very least have been
a bank clerk or a night school teacher of reading and writing because, all
my life, consciously or unconsciously, I have sought out fathers. Ahmed Sina